


with the furies breathing down your neck

by paperclipbitch



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Apocalypse, Community: fan_flashworks, Community: fc_smorgasbord, Gen, References to Drugs, References to Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-12 15:49:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4485459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[Present Day AU] Johanna supposes that if you considered it from a different angle and squinted a lot, some aspect of this might actually look like a road trip.</p>
            </blockquote>





	with the furies breathing down your neck

**Author's Note:**

> [Title from _It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)_ by REM.] Written for the challenge _The End of the World_ at **fan_flashworks** , and also for the prompt 093. _stubbornness_ for **fc_smorgasboard**. Finnick and Johanna roadtrip the apocalypse. I'm handwavy about it, as I am about people like Annie, so, just, go with it. And I quote The End of the World by Skeeter Davis at one point.

“I made a playlist,” Finnick says in the passenger seat, grin white-toothed and broad as it ever was on billboards in his underwear. He’s in a sweater today, and jeans, and he’s armed with a trident and a backpack of cigarettes and about three weeks’ worth of Johanna’s medication.

Johanna locks the car doors even though she doubts that’ll do much good in the scheme of things, and says: “if it’s got REM on it, you can walk.”

Finnick laughs, slumping in his seat, and says: “it’s traditional to have playlists for road trips.”

Johanna supposes that if you considered it from a different angle and squinted a lot, some aspect of this might actually look like a road trip. 

“Did you make us a mixtape?” she asks, twisting the key in the ignition and hoping that they’ve got enough gas in the tank.

“Well, no,” Finnick says. “I considered it, but, you know, I did want us to get out of here in time to escape the blast radius.”

-

Johanna first met Finnick somewhere around the time he was fucking everyone he knew and remembering very little of it in the morning, crashing on Cinna’s couch at weird hours and always bright-cocaine-eyed and dirty-mouthed. She hated him immediately, almost as much she hated herself at that stage in her life, paying someone else’s dues and spending most of her waking hours wishing for suffocation just for something to do. Finnick was kind of a dick, but his sense of humour was briskly sharp around the edges and there was something that drew her to him besides the weary glitter of his feigned personality.

The years have changed them both more than a little; Finnick tells her she’s softened and sometimes she believes him, eyerolling and kicking at him in her favourite battered boots, and she doesn’t know how to describe what’s become of Finnick, whose eyes flicker more haunted but whose smile is more sincere.

He’s not necessarily the person Johanna would’ve chosen to try and escape the end of the world with, but her list of choices would never have been that long, and he’s better than most of them.

-

They play I-Spy over the corpses on the roadside, splitting candy raided from an abandoned gas station and bickering over whether _carrion_ was too fancy a word for the game. It’s been three days since they drove out of the city with the engine screeching like it would never last; but it did, and they’re not dead yet, and the sun’s shining down on the cracking tarmac like it’s forgotten this kind of armageddon calls for bitterer weather.

Johanna shifts her shoulders and plucks at the front of the vest she’s been wearing for two days now, stuck to her with her stale sweat and gritty with road dust. It’s hot, but they’ve got the windows rolled up; they’ve silently agreed that they want to breathe as little of the air outside as possible.

They don’t exactly have a map, or a destination, and the broken GSP on the dashboard occasionally babbles nonsense words like it’s trying to remember its purpose and saying _left left yards left_ over and over again will alleviate its own loneliness. Johanna refuses to empathise. But there was supposedly a city with underground bunkers that wasn’t going to get hit, and if they can make it there they might just outlive this after all.

In reality, Johanna suspects that they’ll just drive until they run out of gas, and die horribly in a burned-out field somewhere, starved and dehydrated and probably bleeding out of their eyeballs, but hey; it’s not like she’s got anything else going on this month.

-

Finnick ruffles his hair, too in shadow for her to see the way the sun is bleaching it ever more gold. The sun agrees with him, bringing out the glitter in his eyes, the purity of his skin; they don’t need models now the world’s gone to shit, but no one’s told Finnick that, and he’s wearing the dirt and the sleep deprivation and the terror better than Johanna is, anyway. She just looks faded out, eyes ringed in purple-black and lips cracking like the sidewalks of the empty towns they roll through like tumbleweed. Sometimes people are still there, dead in their homes, features swarming messes of black flies; mostly, though, they’ve gone. Maybe they’re still running, frantic miles ahead of Johanna and Finnick and their last-ditch attempt not to die in the gutters they pulled themselves out of in the first place.

Haymitch left the day before they did, drunk behind the wheel and laughing at a joke he wouldn’t tell them; Johanna wasn’t holding out hope for reprieve because her hope was kicked out of her in a dozen nights she doesn’t think about anymore, but she still thought there might be options. There weren’t. Her options were the same as they always have been: the open road, her bloodied fingernails, and Finnick.

“It could just be us, you know,” Finnick says; they haven’t got a radio and phone signal collapsed days ago. “We could be the only ones left.”

Johanna tips her head and considers this, eating corn chips and swigging them down with over-warm Diet Coke. 

“You mean that at the end of the world all that’s left are the cockroaches and the ex-hookers?” she asks.

Finnick flinches, and then tries to hide it. “I was just going to go with ‘cockroaches’,” he says, “I figured it covered all the bases.”

In many ways, it does.

-

Finnick sleeps in the passenger seat and Johanna listens to his playlist, tapping her ragged fingernails on the steering wheel, out of time. He looks softer in sleep, more vulnerable, less like the glittering man from a hundred advertisements who slept his way to the top and then stayed sleeping to stay there, and more like the man who calls her at midnight and tells her to help him drink and never to stop.

 _Why does my heart go on beating?_ ponders the music spilling out of the car’s speakers; sooner or later his iPod will run out of battery and the car will run out of gas and the sanctuary they’re heading for may turn out not to exist after all.

“Hey,” Johanna murmurs into the silence of the night, “someone’s has to.”


End file.
